The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Melissa Nicolas

Keywords: teaching, stigmatization, community

Categories: Teaching as Carework, Teaching as Dangerous Work; Building Community in Isolating Times

Content warning: stigmatization

My husband calls them the plague bearers. He is referring to our students and their descent upon our campus. Last fall, even though we were fully remote and our students were asked to stay home, a good number ignored that request {1} (some, with good reason), but what frosted all of our cupcakes was that when those students came back, they did everything they were not supposed to do, such as gathering in large groups without masks or not social distancing. Infection rates in our small town, which had been pretty low all summer, dangerously spiked at the end of August and the beginning of September, and there were fears that our regional hospital wouldn’t be able to handle the rapid increase. Long story short, lots of people got sick, and lots of people blamed the students.

With the students returning to campus this week (August 2021), there is much Sturm and Drang about what “they” will do to “us.” Memos from upper administration have been popping up like dandelions. We need an algorithm to help us map all the do’s and don’ts, policies and procedures, enforcement rules, and the sometimes hourly changing of mandates. These memos reinforce the idea that students will probably do bad things and contaminate us, the faculty who need to be vigilant enforcers of the rules.

I do research on the history of plague and pestilence (yes, I spend a lot of time reading and writing about the evacuation of bodily fluids), so I find my husband’s misguided metaphor strangely intriguing. I imagine black rats from the Black Death running around campus, buying textbooks, going to football games, typing on mini-mini iPads. And that is a problem. I hate rats. If I think about my students as plague bearers, which makes me associate them with rats, not only am I thinking of them as rodents but I am also imagining them as someTHING that I hate.

When faculty talk about students coming to our campus and contaminating us, we are engaging in the common (though tragic) practice of stigmatizing foreigners and immigrants (Kitta, 2019, p. 26) as, well. . . plague bearers. It is an all-too-common rhetorical trope, dating back at least to the Middle Ages.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I bought into this contagion narrative. At least I did until today. When I pull up to campus today THEY are HERE, and I can’t stop smiling. They didn’t look like black rats; they looked like young people coming back to our shared home. Campus is noisy as gaggles of first-year students play ice breakers, and the local bars are pumping music out of their front doors. And then it gets even louder when the marching band starts practicing the fight song underneath my office window. I remember the marching band doing that in 2019. I was so frustrated. There I was trying to prep for my classes—which is what college is really about, thank you very much!—and the damn band was making it hard to concentrate.

But today. Oh today! As I write, friendships are forming, and people are coupling up, maybe even with their future life-partners; loved ones are crying (or jumping for joy) at dropping off their babies. Beer is being drunk, the meaning of life is being contemplated, posters are being hung. Our campus mascot is out and about, waving to people and taking pictures.

I know the Delta variant is here and that there will be new cases, and even breakthrough cases, but I don’t think our students are plague bearers. “They” are just as scared as “we” are. We are requiring all students to show proof of vaccination by September 10^th, so in many ways our campus and our town will have a much higher vaccination rate than just about anywhere else in the country. And I sure as heck am enjoying these beautiful, noisy young people who have just gotten to town. I hope they get to stay awhile. WE need THEM.

***

Maybe in times of pandemic and crisis, it makes the most sense to worry about the very practical things in front of us: wearing masks, sanitizing surfaces, reducing large indoor gatherings and the like, but increasingly, I find myself caring about what the pandemic is doing to us—the university community. After all, if faculty now see students as a potential threat to our safety and wellbeing, what short- and long-term damage will that do to how students and faculty relate to each other? What will it take for us to be able to trust each other again?

References

Kitta, A. (2019). The Kiss of death: Contagion, contamination, and folklore. Utah State University Press.

Bio

Melissa Nicolas is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition at Washington State University.